what’s wrong with acc
and how to fix it
Matthew’s previous
post in this series
Part 3: Intention
Having looked at mission and trust, let’s turn to the institutional structures and processes that make administration possible. “Structures and processes” is a way of drawing attention to the features of our organization that accomplish the work of the college. The three most important functions of administration are forward planning, decision-making, and codification of processes. Obviously these functions overlap, but let’s just say that forward planning is about strategic planning for the future, decision-making focuses on managing the affairs of the institution in the present, and codification is about establishing and maintaining the “how-to manual” for our functions and operations (including planning and decision-making).
Please note that I’m not focusing here on individuals and their individual acts of planning or decision making. Rather, I want to focus on institutional structures and processes and look at whether they facilitate a mission-centered confidence-inducing culture.
Let’s start with decision-making.
You’ve probably heard the one about decision making: “Decisions should be made at the lowest administrative level.” (Pause for laughter) What’s often unspoken is how we determine what the lowest administrative level is. Decisions should be made at the lowest administrative level with the requisite perspective and resources for effective decision-making. And when we unpack “effective,” it’s obvious that the most important criterion of effectiveness — assuming we want to be a mission-centered institution — is whether the core mission is furthered.
ACC’s decision-making structures effectively push decisions upward, toward the top of the institution which of course is why most of us laugh when we hear that formula. Suppose there’s a local and specific physical obstacle to instruction: The structures and process of our organization tend to encourage facilities and instructional people each to escalate that problem through their own chains of command, which means that a solution will be found, if at all, many levels above the actual problem.
Let’s consider a specific example as a case study: the allocation of office space. While I fully endorse oversight of the assignment of office spaces that does away with a “squatter“ mentality among units, we’ve created an expensive, top-heavy structure for making decisions about the allocation of office space that doesn’t necessarily improve effectiveness or strategic goals. To put this more plainly, we’re investing a lot of money to make relatively low level decisions about who sits in which office, with much less actual insight into conditions on the ground. (I have frequently threatened to calculate how much the office assignment committee costs just to meet, given the number of very high-level administrators who are alleged to attend those meetings. Is the cost worth the strategic result of this investment?)
But my favorite example of a decision structure that encourages escalating decisions way above the strategic importance level is food. As a dean of a large division, I have to get the approval of an administrator two levels above me to buy donuts for a meeting with money in my own budget. I could be wrong – and I’m willing to be schooled – but I have trouble seeing how donuts play such a strategic role in ACC’s well-being that this decision requires a vice president. Moreover, if you can’t trust deans to make grounded decisions about priorities within a hospitality budget, then you either have the wrong deans, or that’s evidence of a systematic lack of trust in the leadership downstream. The argument that ACC policy “requires” this level of oversight isn’t an explanation but a revelation of this lack of trust: Who writes the policies?
ACC’s forward planning involves analogous structural problems. Review, if you will, the planning processes operative at ACC at this very moment: There’s the normal planning that will take place in departments and divisions and units up and down the college (like program review and other quality assurance activities), but in addition, there’s budget planning, there’s the academic master plan, there’s the Chancellor’s Priorities, and recently there’s the QEP. And there’s no clear connection between any of these processes; they operate in parallel but with significant overlap and different leadership. Who can blame people for having a hard time grasping the point of so many multiple simultaneous overlapping planning processes?
Institutional structures and processes are concrete manifestations of decision-making and forward planning, and institutional structures and processes are also the primary vehicles by which we pursue the mission of the institution. But structures and processes are organic, which means that they tend to grow in whatever directions they find less resistance — which means: not necessarily toward the mission.
For years, I have encouraged integration and partnership between instruction and advising — and it’s not hard to see why: Think trust and mission. We were well on the road to integrating advisers into areas of study, an important step toward achieving that integration and partnership, when we recently made a decision to create a new function, the entry advisor. I have no doubt that the entry advisors serve a needed function and fill a gap in our services to students, so I don’t want to be misunderstood as saying we didn’t need them. But what I do want to say that we didn’t include instructional leaders in that decision or in the implementation of the new structure. What do entry advisors need to know from instructional leaders to empower them on the front lines of helping students register in courses — you know, courses that we teach in instruction?
We can tell much the same story about signs and symptoms in the codification of structures and processes. Let’s say you want to understand some relatively routine task like assigning sections to professors: How many different ARs would you need to consult to get the whole picture of the task at hand? And how would you interpret the vague and even incoherent language of these multiple “takes” on the same function? Does it seem healthy that the “authoritative texts” of our institution ground inconsistent practices in various units, all of which claim to be adhering to policy?
It’s one thing to rely on a key administrator to resolve conflicts and omissions in our policy statements; it’s quite another to rely on a key administrator to read the text to us and interpret what it says. Shouldn’t that make us want to clarify the text, the language of the AR, so that — in the spirit of the principle of decision-making at the lowest administrative level — we empower middle administrators to do their jobs?
Now, as a good faith effort to prevent you from stroking out or decompensating into a psychotic episode, let me remind you again that my goal here is not to indict any specific person for these signs and symptoms. On the contrary, my point is to provide for grounded diagnosis and an attempt at a prescription. So let’s ask some obvious questions about the way our structures and processes operate, and what we can do about it.
I argue that the institutional effect of these signs and symptoms is a tendency to concentrate institutional decision-making authority upward, with a concomitant decrease in trust downward. Now, to connect to my main theme in this post, I do not believe that this effect of a set of structures and processes is anybody’s intention. I don’t think that there are nefarious motives in secret meetings to create structures designed to neutralize confidence-inducing practices or fragment work so as to induce the upward drift of decision-making and decoherence of mission.
What I am saying, however, is that nobody intended not to.
Most people conscientiously work at the structures and processes with which they are directly involved, and they do so with nominal reference to the mission of the institution. Nevertheless, are we looking at the net effect of the processes and structures we have allowed to take root and propagate?
Think of a warehouse distribution center. There’s obviously a point to the warehouse, and there’s obviously a point to all the boxes that fill that warehouse. But in forward-planning, decision-making, and codification of practices, ACC is a heap of methodically-packed individual boxes that are stacked and piled helter-skelter in a warehouse with relatively little apparent order or interconnection. Packing the boxes keeps us busy — and we can comfort ourselves that we are hard at work on our “mission” — but how is the condition of the whole conducive to the function of the warehouse — its mission?
This warehouse metaphor may reveal how things got this way. Consider the conscientious manager of the warehouse looking around for box packers: “Oh, Matthew’s good at packing boxes. I’ll assign these boxes to him.” But then there’s this other pile of boxes, and another, and another, matched up to competent box-packers, everywhere you look in the organization.
What’s missing in that decision process is not the intention to get the boxes packed well; rather, what’s missing is the intention to organize the boxes in a way that aligns with the mission as judged by outsiders to the inherent functions, and in a way that induces confidence and creates a sense of purpose and belonging throughout the warehouse — purpose and belonging that are required for our core mission.
Let’s go back to one of my case studies: office assignments. If I ask whether this top-heavy, expensive decision process serves the core mission of the institution, the answer should be a resounding yes, with an explanation that explicitly lays out the added value to the mission in a way that induces confidence up and down the institution, in a way that convinces the outsider. The obvious obstacle to overcome in giving that kind of explanation is that it needs to show why the balance is so drastically tipped in favor of high-level administrators, people who mean well but who don’t know much about the tactical value of particular faculty and staff on the front lines — but who nevertheless, have put themselves in a position to decide where those people do their work.
I contend that the diagnosis of ACC’s disease, if you will, is Hyperactivity of Parts/Atrophy of Wholes Disorder. If this diagnosis is hard to square up with your experience, the two most likely explanations are (1) you’re at the center of a single hyperactive part, conscientiously packing your boxes, or (2) altitude.
It’s pretty clear what would fix this disorder: Taking care to extend the methodical intention we apply to box-packing to the whole warehouse. Doing so requires a reorientation, a change in how we relate to the organization of our organization. Essentially, it requires the operationalization of mission, trust, and intention, not in words, but in the fabric of the institution — that is, in the deeds by which we create this institution.
